Science and technology innovations on the horizon

Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil shares his predictive timeline up to the year 2099

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO - Elon Musk gives insight into his vision of human and machine intelligence as an inevitable progression

Scientific progress in development of first quantum computers

“ Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold ”

– Ray Kurzweil

Technical Director at Google and most renowned technology futurist Ray Kurzweil spoke with another round of predictions

Tech Radar

Kurzweil as if invites you to participate in the intellectual game and collect the puzzle – picture of the future of his old and new predictions.

2030 – The Flowering of nanotechnology in industry that will lead to a signicant reduction in the cost of production of all products.

2035 – Space technology will be sufficiently developed to ensure the protection of the Earth from the threat of asteroid impacts.

2040 – The Search engines will be the basis for gadgets that will be implanted in the human body. The search will be carried out not only through language, but through thoughts, and the search results will be displayed on the screen the same lenses or glasses.

2045 – The onset of the technological singularity. The earth will turn into one giant computer.

2099 – The Process of technological singularity extends to the entire Universe.

” Effectively merging in a symbiotic way with digital intelligence revolves around eliminating the I/O constraint, which would be some sort of direct cortical interface “

– Elon Musk

If we want to avoid becoming redundant with the artificial intelligence that is slowly surrounding us, we must merge with machines to stay relevant. That’s one of the messages that Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared at the World Government Summit in Dubai.

What Musk is referring is often called “transhumanism,” or an enhancement of humanity’s capabilities through science and technology. To a certain degree, transhumanism is a daily reality for many people. We keep iPhones, tablets, and laptops on our persons now in a way that was rare a decade ago.

So, too, do brain-computer interfaces assist individuals with disabilities, like enabling communication for persons with traumatic brain injuries or elevating motor control for patients with paralysis. In these cases, the brain via implanted electrodes signals and translates a motion command for a robot or cursor.

Musk adheres to the idea that humans need to harness and integrate that processing power, rather than keep it exterior. He analogized how we type as a way to communicate at the rate of 10 bits per second in comparison to a computer’s trillion bits per second. “Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem,” Musk continued. These problems of “control” and “usefulness” can alleviate a future scenario in which, as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, it could lead to mass unemployment. Suggesting that the categories of jobs that a robot can’t do better than humans will become fewer and fewer, Musk insisted that, to add value to the economy, we must augment our capabilities through this combination of biological and machine intelligence.

” By 2028, intelligent machines will exist that can do anything humans can do; quantum computers will have played a critical role in the creation of this new type of intelligence “

– Geordie Rose

A small quantum computer is able to run a number of algorithms

Superposition in Quibit

Computer scientists have created a small programmable quantum computer that can run a number of quantum algorithms.

Quantum computers have the potential to be much faster than conventional computers but due to the physics underlying their creation they are difficult to program and reconfigure.

Now, a new, small, quantum computer has been built by a research team at the University of Maryland. It is one of the first significant steps towards scaling up the devices.

Using laser pulses, which can be turned on and off, the academics were able to implement the quantum algorithms.

The device is made up of five pieces of quantum information – known as qubits. Traditionally bits can only ever be in the state of 0 or 1, but a qubit can be a supposition of both.

In reality this means a large-scale quantum computer (which has not yet been achieved) would be made of many qubits that can answer multiple questions at once. Such a device would be much faster than any computer that exists today and would be able to process multiple things at once.

Now the Maryland researchers plan to start working on exactly this. “The next step is to miniaturise the system; to come up with a compact version,” Debnath explains. “This means improving the ion trap, improving the way you deliver the lasers and all your controls into the system. Also, to scale it up and have more qubits in the processor.”

The theory behind this has yet to be completely proved but the latest work does allow for the scaling to be started.